Seagate Seven External USB 3.0 Drive Review

Posted by Nathan Kirsch| Fri, Feb 27, 2015 - 9:29 AM

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Final Thoughts & Conclusions

At the end of the day the Seagate Seven was found to be a solid premium portable hard drive that is aimed at consumers looking for an all steel enclosure that is as thin as possible. This drive makes a statement when it is pulled out of a laptop bag as it looks unique and the fabric braided USB 3.0 data cable adds to the high quality premium appearance.

With regards to performance we found the Seagate Seven was capable of 112MB/s read and 112MB/s write speeds on our sequential file transfer tests and the drive never got hotter than 40C when moving around 20GB test files. These transfer speeds are as solid for a traditional hard drive, but fail to impress the performance numbers seen on Solid-State Drives as we’ve tested models that can approach up to 475MB/s sequential read/write on the USB 3.0 interface. Luckily, hard drives are less costly than SSD’s and there is still a need for rotational storage in the market.

When it comes to pricing the Seagate Seven is backed by a 3-year limited warranty and runs $96.24 shipped from Amazon. If that is too pricey for you there is always the Seagate Expansion 500GB Portable USB 3.0 Drive that is backed by a 1-year warranty and is currently $48.99 shipped! Keep in mind that the Seagate Expansion 500GB portable drive is 15.5mm thick, so you loose the the sleekness of the all steel Seagate Seven portable drive. Seagate only offers the Seven in a 500GB version, so you don’t have to worry about choosing a capacity!

Seagate clearly made this drive for those that hate the bulky plastic external drive housings and we easily give it the thumbs up if the 500GB capacity is enough for your needs and you are okay with a rotational storage drive.

Legit Bottom Line: The Seagate Seven is the thinnest 500GB portable USB 3.0 hard drive and it features a sleek high-end design that should appeal to many tech-savvy consumers!